News archive 2005

Alumnus wins Guardian book prize

19 Dec 2005, PR 113/05

A King's physics graduate has won a top literary accolade by picking up the Guardian's ‘First Book Award' for a ‘topsy-turvy' account of the saga of a wild street vagrant.

Stuart: A Life Backwards, written by Alexander Masters (Physics 1987, First Class Hons), was completed after its protagonist's death in front of a train at the age of 32.

The book won the award in an exceptionally strong field of new authors and it narrowly failed to win the Samuel Johnson non-fiction prize earlier this year and is also shortlisted for the Whitbread awards in January.

The Guardian's literary editor, Claire Armistead, said:‘If you were just going on the subject matter of Stuart, you'd have thought it would be a depressing but worthy read. But Alexander Masters has such a light touch, and the character of Stuart himself is so spikily attractive and so admirable in unexpected ways, that it becomes absolutely compelling. It was Stuart himself who suggested it should be written backwards, and the fact that Masters rewrote it accordingly is typical of the relationship that emerges through the book. Part of the genius of the book lies in the matching of a topsy-turvy structure to a topsy-turvy life.'

Masters, 40, who met Stuart Shorter as a social worker and this year became a full-time writer, said he was ‘just amazed' at winning. ‘It's glorious to get a prize which you feel will really kickstart everything. It's the prize everyone aspires to. I wish Stuart was here to share it. I think he'd have been overjoyed and jumped around, then we'd probably have gone out and got slaughtered. He very much wanted me to do the book, but I worried how he would take it.'

Notes to editors

King's College London
King's College London is one of the two oldest and largest colleges of the University of London with over 13,800 undergraduate students and nearly 5,700 postgraduates in nine schools of study. It is a member of the Russell Group: a coalition of the UK's major research-based universities. The College has had 24 of its subject-areas awarded the highest rating of 5* and 5 for research quality, demonstrating excellence at an international level, and it has recently received an excellent result in its audit by the Quality Assurance Agency.

King's is in the top group of UK universities for research earnings, with income from grants and contracts of £100 million, and has an annual turnover of more than £348 million. In 2004 the College was once again awarded an AA- financial credit rating from Standard & Poor's.



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